Eat Up Martha

Back in the 1990's, Apple invented what could be seen as the precursor to the iPhone - a PDA called the Newton. It featured an at-the-time revolutionary feature - handwriting recognition. You would write using the included stylus directly onto the screen, and it would immediately translate your handwriting into type.

Theoretically.

In practice, the recognition often made mistakes. It would compare a guess of what it thought you wrote against an internal dictionary, and so would occasionally substitute completely the wrong word - although still correctly spelled.

This "feature" was even spoofed on an episode of The Simpsons, Nelson writes "Beat up Martin" on his Newton, which becomes "Eat Up Martha".

Well, I think I've found the Newton for the 21st century. It's a web service called reQall, which keeps track of your to-do list and allows you to access it on your computer, on the web, and over the phone.

One of it's unique selling points is that you can dictate something to remember over the phone, and the service will automatically transcribe it into text and store it in your to-do list. They use actual people to do this, so the transcription should be accurate and reliable. Right?

I've been testing it out. I wanted to remember to bring my Look Around You DVDs into work, so that I could lend them to a co-worker, Peter. So, I activated the reQall app on my iPhone and said, "Bring in 'Look Around You' for Peter.". It saved the recording and sent it off to reQall to be added to my to-do list.

A few minutes later - quick! - it appears. The result?

Reneen look around you for pizza..

Wait, what? That's... awful. Especially as it was transcribed by an actual person. "Reneen" isn't even a word!

Similarity

Ever noticed how AOL.com and Yahoo.com look virtually identical?

iPhone 3G

So yeah, I got one. I'm not entirely sure how, though.

I was all ready to troop down to the O2 store and stand in line, but I happened to check my O2 online account and suddenly discovered that sitting there was a successful order for an iPhone 3G.

I don't really know how it got through, you're supposed to receive a confirmation email, but I did not. Nonetheless, this morning the DHL man delivered a box, and here it is.

Much more interesting is the story of my friend Ed, who, like me, tried repeatedly to order one online and "failed". No such orders appeared on his online account, so he did indeed head down to the O2 store at Very Early in the morning and stood in line.

He stood in line for a very long time, in fact, because the O2 store's computer network crashed at around 8am, so iPhone orders all around the country were being placed using pen and paper, taking around 50 minutes per customer.

It was just a few minutes before he was going to fill out the form and buy one that the unbelievable happened. My iPhone arrived via DHL - and so did his. He was also apparently successful at ordering one, except O2 hadn't bothered to tell him this at all until the thing actually showed up.

So I made a panic phone call and caught him just in time to prevent him from buying two of them.

O2's level of incompetence never fails to astound me.